


The Smell Before Rain

by ameliajean



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-11
Updated: 2012-02-11
Packaged: 2017-10-30 23:36:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/337435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ameliajean/pseuds/ameliajean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>You are calm and reposed; let your beauty unfold</i><br/>Pale white, like the skin stretched over your bones<br/>Spring keeps you ever close; you are secondhand smoke<br/>You're so fragile and thin, standing trial for your sins</p><p>"The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot" // Brand New</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Smell Before Rain

**Author's Note:**

> Post-Reichenbach.

The cup hooks drove him absolutely mad.

It was nothing at first; just a twinge of annoyance across his brow and then his hands right back into the soapy dishwater, fingers sliding across the tines of a fork to rid them of caked-on pasta sauce.

But it grew. It blossomed in his chest like the very last thing John decided he would tolerate. Between thumb and forefinger, he twisted the hooks back into place as the threads stripped the wood until they were perpetually loose, and then, then, he knew the cups would begin to fall and crack, and who would replace them?

It was enough that the man rarely ate, but John supposed the tiniest amount of care could be afforded to the cups from which Sherlock drank his tea—his only nourishment on those nights when nothing seemed to make the right amount of sense.

And yet. Yet, there they were, the cup hooks nearly unscrewed and staring him right in the face every time a dish or twelve needed washing.

It didn't bother John to cook the meals, or clean the flatware, or pay for the takeaway when the other two became tiresome.

This, though. Something about the teacups made his insides twist because it wasn't _just_ the teacups.

 _One day_ , he finally decides. _One day I will tell him just exactly how to use a screwdriver and he will place the cups just so._

_And I will breathe easier when I lay down to sleep._

The thought is ethereal and fragile and vanishes before John can shape it into something with well-defined edges. The dishwater is warm and creates raisin-grooves in his fingerprints. The kitchen smells like lemon, and somewhere in the main room, Sherlock is tapping away at John's laptop. A chicken roasts in the oven. John properly lays the table.

"Are you eating, then?" John arches his back to catch a glimpse of his flatmate hunched over in the less comfortable chair, the laptop glowing unnaturally blue around the edges in the warm evening light.

"Just tea," he says after a beat. "I'll take it in here."

The muscles in John's jaw tighten and his fingers curl around the table's edge.

Something like _alright then_ is meant to come out of his mouth but it sounds more like _I'm not your damn servant_ which is tin and hollow and untrue in all the worst ways the moment it hits the air.

John brings him a cup of herbal twelve minutes later and eats his portion of the roast chicken in the comfortable chair without a word. The plate balances awkwardly on his thigh and Sherlock gives it only a momentary glance. It doesn't occur to John that his friend never excuses himself during meals, whether or not he's eating, and that small courtesy is something he affords to no one else.

"Eat something, Sherlock," he pleads. "I've made mash with the skins still in, like at Angelo's."

The reply is terse, as ever. "I'm working."

"But you're," John wants to say _so thin_ and means _so fragile_ and _take care of yourself, please._ "You have to eat."

Sherlock sips his tea and places the cup on a mismatched saucer.

They come to an unspoken compromise some time later when Sherlock plucks a slice of now-cold chicken from John's plate and eats it in one monstrous bite. When he becomes flustered at the feeling of grease slick on his fingertips, Sherlock wipes them across the arm of his friend's jumper and retires to his room.

"Right," John shakes his head in annoyance and deposits the plate in the sink.

The cup with the lukewarm tea still sits in its saucer and John has the strongest urge to knock it onto the floor and test whatever internal theory that's starting to materialize in his subconscious.

He cleans the kitchen instead.

The cup remains.

\- - - -

The pink box in John's arms is filled to bursting and the smile on his face is stretched a mile wide. He climbs the stairs with a lightness in his bones and hears the smooth notes floating from Sherlock's violin before anything else.

The sun has reddened his cheeks a bit. The flowers are blooming early this year.

"I stopped off at the bakery we always pass on the way home from St. Bart's."

"Because you saw an attractive woman purchasing croissants?" Sherlock jabs needlessly, dragging the bow across and back and he keeps his eyes on the window, the clouds stretched thin across the vibrant blue sky of new Spring.

John's cheek dimples as the right side of his mouth turns up in amusement and distaste simultaneously.

"Because I wanted an éclair."

"No thank you," Sherlock says, posture straight as a fencepost.

"I don't believe I offered you any," John sets the box on the desk and folds back its lid.

"Just as well."

A custard pie and a few sausage rolls sit next to the chocolate éclairs in the box. John is most certainly not picky when it comes to food (he survived six days on the freeze-dried rations meant for only three, once) but he detests custard pie has never cared much for sausage rolls, really.

"I'll leave this here in case you change your mind."

Sherlock doesn't turn from the window. "I'll just have some tea at half past."

"Again," John starts, brow knitted with tension. "Not your servant."

The words hold no meaning, never have, and the water boils like the blood in his veins.

He makes the tea, meticulous at each step, after putting the pastry in the refrigerator next to the slices of lung tissue and rips one of the cup hooks from its place. The pressure creates a groove between the first and second bend of his index finger. He fights the urge to clasp one of the cups into his hand and smash it against the wall.

A quick glance into the main room; Sherlock is calm and reposed. The violin is in its proper place.

John thinks about the man at the bakery who so enjoyed chatting about the weather, and the way he felt safe leaving the flat for an hour but anxious as shadows slowly began to elongate on the footpath on the walk home.

His arms feel suddenly heavy and his shoulders weighted; the light seeps from the kitchen and they are alone together, again, in the twilight.

When it's time to sleep, but they're still reading on either end of the couch and John is in his sock feet and Sherlock settles his, bare, against the taught Achilles tendon beneath the worn cotton, and neither says anything, a word slowly formulates to fit the feeling in the pit of John's stomach.

_Preservation._

Not his own.

_It is too much to have lost him once._

The thought burrows deep into the grey matter between his ears and begins to take up too much space. It expands in seconds, minutes, heartbeats. Soon it's all he can do to keep the thought from materializing and tumbling from his lips.

 _It is too much to have lost you once_ , he thinks, loudly, in Sherlock's direction, eyes flicking from the book in his hands to the man next to him and back again within a fraction of a second.

Some visceral feeling makes John believe that his friend is smart enough, brilliant enough, to steal this thought by osmosis and carry it around like a stone in his pocket like it matters; like it will change anything at all.

The pink box sits cockeyed in the bin the next morning.

John doesn't bother to check, but one third of the custard pie has mysteriously vanished.

\- - - -

Molly brings Yorkshire pudding and Mrs. Hudson cooks for days and days, and a long dining table has been fashioned from smaller ones so that cracks between them are felt through the tablecloth.

Snow collects in the window and multicolored lights decorate its edges. Everyone smiles without trying; without making an concerted effort to do so as is the case while in Sherlock Holmes' presence most days. Mrs. Hudson recounts her mother's fastidious recipe card-keeping and the guests' eyes sparkle and the fire cracks beneath the mantle.

John loads his plate with mashed peas and slices of roast beef. The wine bottle is half drunk – partially his doing – and the laughter is light.

Sherlock slides chunks of cooked carrots from one side of his plate to the other.

"Try the pudding," John pushes a dish toward the other man and is met with a grimace.

"I'd rather have tea," he replies softly, knowing this is wrong, somehow, without understanding why. He frowns all the same.

John is tired of trying but it doesn't deter him from doing so.

"It's Christmas, Sherlock, please don't be so… dour."

"I am not dour," he counters, providing little evidence to the contrary. "I am not _hungry_."

Molly clears her throat and pours another glass of wine. Red lipstick stains the cup's edge and she can't take her eyes off of the way the fire licks at the wall behind the world's only Consulting Detective, or the Detective himself, rather, and John barely has the energy to remark upon her dress.

The rest of the meal is eaten in relative silence but it is delicious and John boils the water as if it is his only duty in the world.

When everyone has left, John is drunk, only just, and he watches the other man place each dish carefully into a sink full of warm water and scrape at them with the unease of someone who has never attempted the task. A mess of curls obscures Sherlock's eyes. It's grown too long, but a trim falls under the umbrella of Things for Which Sherlock Holmes Does Not Have Time.

Sherlock completes the task as quiet as a church mouse in stark contrast to John's clanging of pots and pans, as if to say, _I am doing this and you must notice_. Sherlock doesn't care for attention when it comes to tasks at which he is mediocre at best, he finds; this is the first instance of such mediocrity and it distresses him nearly to the point of anxiety despite the fact that dishes aren't supposed to _matter_ and never have, until John changed the rules.

With each small splash of dirty water, each flex of his bicep, the task becomes easier. John watches him with quiet reserve.

It isn't until the foggy edges of sleep that John realizes, no, the cups half-filled with cold tea are still sitting on nearly every surface in the flat.

Something still stings his throat in the middle of the night when he awakes to use the toilet, like he's almost forgotten about the loss but not quite.

Not quite.

\- - - -

The air is warm, speciously so, with thick gusts of cold at just the wrong moments. The cab ride is without the usual banter and time passes in long stretches rather than moments that John might recall later, as is usually the case. The collar is upturned and only their peripheral vision rewards them with a glimpse of one another, now and then, when either dares to crane his neck.

Mrs. Hudson is out and a teacup is cracked on the kitchen table beside the conspicuous scratch and pile of medical texts.

This sight, this final straw – it reaches deep into his chest, grabs his heart, and gives it a squeeze until breathing becomes laborious. The world, his world, _theirs_ tilts just enough in that moment to set him into motion. It isn't the hooks or the cups or the way Sherlock won't eat a proper meal on Tuesdays. It just, it isn't.

John finds his companion reading in the usual place. Bare feet occupy their space on the floor and this is all very crystal clear now, as if something has come and washed the sludge from a pane of glass. The particular words less so.

John enters from the kitchen and pauses only a moment in the main room to drag his eyes over the sitting form. He lowers to a knee and places a hand on either side of Sherlock's body, palms flat on the cushion's greenish grey fabric. Sherlock slowly lowers the newspaper to peer over it and then folds it meticulously before dropping it to the ground beside them.

He raises an eyebrow.

"Sherlock, listen to me."

"I do little else," he croaks, the timbre of his voice suddenly difficult to regulate.

"No, no you don't. You don't listen," John's thumbs find the line of Sherlock's thighs and rest there, a touch too heavily as if to hold him in place, to keep the man steady, as if that's not _exactly_ what he's doing for himself.

It occurs to him then that Mrs. Hudson must keep an array of toiletries on hand because Sherlock's skin smells decidedly like the Irish bar soap John used as a child while his own smells much more industrial.

"I find that I – I," Sherlock lowers his gaze. "I don't like seeing you in such a distasteful position."

John leans his head forward just a bit, to draw his friend's gaze back upward, and their eyelines connect.

"And I don't particularly care," John says. "Now shut up and listen, yeah?"

The room is nearly silent, save for the uneven breathing at Sherlock's knees. John's chest rises and falls in such an odd fashion that it takes them both by surprise. In so many other ways, under different circumstances, this is exactly what their relatives and acquaintances might expect to see upon entering the flat unannounced.

They might prove them right yet.

"Go on."

John shifts just a bit. "What… what will you do?"

There's meant to be more but it doesn't come easily.

"John, please, do hurry this up a bit."

"What will you do," he asks again, hands inching toward Sherlock's waist. "When I haven't left a meal in the fridge? When I don't make the tea, and you're working, and you forget to eat for days and days and I can't force you to slow down?"

It all comes out at once and verbalizing it hurts quite a bit more than John expected.

"I see no eventuality in which those scenarios could possibly occur," he says calmly.

"What about when you've broken all the cups and the hooks don't hang anymore and you cut your stupid lip on the chipped porcelain and I'm not here to glue you back together? What then?"

"Again," Sherlock shifts in his seat. "I see no—"

"Right, right. But if I'm to have a wife, children, a life outside of this… this…"

"John—"

"I mean really, Sherlock," John's fingers edge under the fabric of the man's shirt and search higher, higher, until they curl themselves around the hollow lower portion of Sherlock's ribcage. They search the rise and fall, one by one; the soft, delicate skin stretched over muscle and bone.

"I am… trying," he says. It comes out in a voice unfamiliar to his ears.

John exhales deeply and rests his forehead on knobby knees.

"Try harder."

The air is stale on his tongue as Sherlock opens his mouth to speak, closes it, opens it once more, and finally decides on saying nothing at all. John's fingers are splayed at his companion's sides and fill the gaps where more cushioning ought to be and neither can tell which bones are which and whether or not they would want to, if they could.

John feels the slim torso shift beneath his palms and arms encircle him, nearly; Sherlock's breath is in the hollow of his neck and the jumper is being peeled from his skin beginning at the hem. Slow, measured, the Detective slides the fabric over just a hint of love handles, just a hint, and neither speaks.

John removes his hands without a word and Sherlock can't help but miss the warmth like muscle memory. It's as if his body is missing something of which it was once replete. He feels the loss deeper than one ought to, he imagines.

He also imagines that John's supposition of _I'm not here_ might actually mean something like _you're not here_ , and the soldier, the Doctor, might feel it his duty to prevent such things having failed so completely the first time 'round.

John is irrational in this way.

And yet. Yet, here he is, Sherlock Holmes, the world's only Consulting Detective, _trying_.

John raises his arms above his head and the jumper is pulled away from his body until he's kneeling, half-undressed, motionless on the floor waiting for whatever it is that comes next.

"I apologize for staining the sleeve," Sherlock tries desperately to keep his eyes on the grease stain from months prior. "I'll have this laundered for you."

"It's…" John wants to say _this was my favorite and you can't because it's permanent, now_ but doesn't. "It's okay."

"I'll buy you a new one, then, if you'd like."

"I… thank you, yes."

He's out the door in a flash, nearly forgetting shoes. The sky darkens, full of moisture, and when he returns, his hair is wetted down with rain.

When John awakes the next morning, every dish in the house is clean and tucked away. He notices that the hooks have gone, replaced with a sturdy cup rack.

Sun filters into the main room creating oblong shadows along the floor. He pours a bowl of cereal and sits at the desk. Moments later, as if the shaking of the cereal box were some sort of clarion call, Sherlock is sitting across from him with a bowl of his own. When Sherlock bends to retrieve errant pages of newspaper from the floor, the fabric at his hip rides low and three perfectly round welts peek out.

John tries his best to act especially casual and fails, mostly, because he cannot stop grinning. He lays his cheek against the shoulder of his new jumper when Sherlock is preoccupied with the International Affairs section and smells his childhood enmeshed with the soft cotton.

They have dinner at Angelo's, between one case and the next, and Sherlock eats half a plate of white-sauced pasta with peas and slices of chicken.

In a month, John takes his Consulting Detective's button-down shirts to the laundry to be let out, just a bit.

Just enough.


End file.
